Girl Talk documentary receives praise and award at International Documentary Film Festival

Rip: A Remix Manifesto, a documentary made by Brett Gaylor about the mash-up music of Greg Gillis (Girl Talk) won the Dioraphte Audience Award and a standing ovation at the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam this past weekend.

The film touches upon the legal and copyright issues that face our formidable DJ. In the words of Director Gaylor, "I wanted to document and explore the war of ideas between those who want to share ideas -- the copyleft -- and those who want to lock up ideas - the copyright."

The film includes interviews with Gillis, his friends and family, and even has clips of the hero of copyright law himself, Lars Ulrich of Metallica. Additionally, in the spirit of his subject, it is open to prospective film mashers.

Gaylor: "We made the film in collaboration with the Open Source Cinema community," Gaylor said. "[It's] a remix website launched so that peers could remix and contribute to the film. We posted our raw footage under a Creative Commons license, and asked people to remix it around key themes. The resulting work was then included in the film -- the goal is for these stages of remixing to continue throughout our festival release, and then once the film moves from "beta" to 1.0 -- that we release it to the web." [Source: The Tripwire]